Noam Chomsky is a US political theorist and activist, and institute professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Besides his work in linguistics, Chomsky is internationally recognized as one of the most critically engaged public intellectuals alive today. Chomsky continues to be an unapologetic critic of both American foreign policy and its ambitions for geopolitical hegemony and the neoliberal turn of global capitalism, which he identifies in terms of class warfare waged from above against the needs and interests of the great majority. Chomsky is also an incisive critic of the ideological role of the mainstream corporate mass media, which, he maintains, "manufactures consent" toward the desirability of capitalism and the political powers supportive of it. -- International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest.

He is a prolific author whose works include: American Power and the New Mandarins; Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (with Edward Herman); Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy; Making the Future: The Unipolar Imperial Moment; New World of Indigenous Resistance: Voices from the Americas; The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature (with Michel Foucault); and Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use.

We welcome two important conferences which share panel participants in common and will take place in the same week as Left Forum: